http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1951 2013-05-19T09:09:40Z 2013-05-19T09:09:40Z Al Sahli, Fahad Saad Alsahli, Fahad Saad http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6663 2013-04-19T12:20:56Z 2012-11-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Learning and self-regulation in translation studies: the experience of students’ in three contrasting undergraduate courses in Saudi Arabia Authors: Al Sahli, Fahad Saad; Alsahli, Fahad Saad Abstract: A great expansion is underway in the Saudi higher education system as it moves from an elite to a mass form of higher education. The number of universities, for example, has jumped from eight universities in 2000 to more than 24 in 2011. Given the scale of investment called for, questions are being increasingly asked about the effectiveness of the higher education system. As a contribution to those processes of greater scrutiny, the present study explores the perceptions of Saudi students of learning and teaching in translation studies. The broad aim of the study is to throw some light on how students learn and regulate their learning in translation studies, and how they are influenced by the course design. While the strongest emphasis of this study was on students’ self-regulation of their learning, this is presented as one aspect of their approaches to learning, and in order to illuminate these self-regulated approaches to learning, students’ perceptions of the teaching and learning environments (TLEs), and their orientations to learning were examined as well. Three contrasting undergraduate courses were examined using a mixed method approach combining Likert-style questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. A total of 352 students were surveyed using an adapted version of Vermunt’s Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS). This was complemented by interviews with 34 students. Six case studies were drawn out from the interview data for indepth analysis of students’ experience of studying in this particular context. In order to capture the richness and distinctiveness of the learning in translation studies, it was necessary to distinguish two contrasting approaches; one of them is a deep self-regulated approach, and the other is a surface unregulated approach to studying. Each of these approaches is contextualised within the learning in translation studies. There were some important environmental influences on these approaches including: course characteristics, classroom teaching, and feedback and assessment. In addition to this, four types of orientations were discerned among those group of students; academic, personal, vocational, and social. All of these types have intrinsic and extrinsic forms except the personal and the social which had intrinsic forms only. The study concludes with conceptual, methodological, and practical implications drawn from the findings. Perhaps the most important implication is the need to improve students’ skills in self-regulation over the course of their studies. This research provides insights into the experience of learning of this group of students, at the same time it emphasises the need for more studies on this under-researched group of students.

2012-11-29T00:00:00Z Li, Jingyi http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6573 2013-02-27T12:09:11Z 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Transmission of cultural values in the production of EFL textbooks for the Chinese primary curriculum Authors: Li, Jingyi Abstract: In the global world, cultural issues relating to the subject of English as Foreign Language (EFL) have become important. This is especially the case when considering the EFL curriculum for Chinese Primary Education. Many writers have addressed the nature of curriculum design as knowledge and cultural reproduction, but usually in the North American and European literature. This research takes these debates and relocates them in the context of China as it enters a new market economy, embedded in its own version of ‘internationalism’. The 2001 national curriculum marked the beginning of China’s educational reform. From a reading of this literature, two main questions emerged: 1) what cultural values are transmitted through EFL textbooks for Chinese Primary Education?; 2) how do curriculum-making processes impact upon textbook production? The findings provide an important insight into knowledge and cultural reproduction in Chinese Education, especially in the subject of EFL. Two volumes of EFL textbooks, which were used in primary schools, were selected to examine the delivery of cultural values. Based on these initial findings, the researcher conducted a series of interviews and focus groups in order to trace the process of textbook production and curriculum creation. Participants included educational administrators in the Ministry of Education in China, curriculum designers, textbook editors from both Chinese and foreign publishers as well as classroom teachers. Research findings suggest that, the production of EFL textbooks should be recognised as a part of curriculum-making processes in the context of Chinese Primary Education. The ‘textbook’ can be seen as the ‘official’ interpretation of the Chinese culture. Indeed, the EFL curriculum is recognized as a vehicle for moral education by policy makers and educators. EFL textbooks include many moral messages promoting expected behaviour in contemporary China – ‘diligence, independence, respect and obedience, patriotism and collectivism’. The processes of generating this ‘production’ have spaces for less ‘official’ and more ‘hidden’ curriculum messages. Indeed, ‘lacunae’ – hidden spaces – in EFL curriculum design and textbook production have been identified. Various key players are involved in the curriculum-making process, including the State, its agencies, and intellectuals. However, instead of being a straight top-down structure led by the political elites, the strict control of the State over curriculum policy-making is finely nuanced. In fact, it was found that the practices of curriculum-making involve a complicated State-intellectuals partnership. Further, it is mainly the culture of the intellectual group which is reproduced through the EFL subject in Chinese Primary Education. Textbook editors and censors, inherently part of the intellectual elites, and key players in the curriculum designing process, rely heavily upon their own version of ‘common sense’. This thesis therefore concludes that the ‘hidden spaces’ through which curriculum design, development and delivery take place, generate a more nuanced understanding of Chinese cultural reproduction, than has previously been thought.

2012-06-29T00:00:00Z Ross, Jennifer http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6321 2012-08-22T13:46:23Z 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Unmasking online reflective practices in higher education Authors: Ross, Jennifer Abstract: Online reflective practices that are high-stakes – summatively assessed, or used as evidence for progression or membership in a professional body – are increasingly prevalent in higher education, especially in professional and vocational programmes. A combination of factors is influencing their emergence: an e-learning agenda that promises efficiency and ubiquity; a proliferation of employability, transferable skills and personal development planning policies; a culture of surveillance which prizes visibility and transparency; and teacher preference for what are seen as empowering pedagogies. This thesis analyses qualitative interview data to explore how students and teachers negotiate issues of audience, performance and authenticity in their high-stakes online reflective practices. Using mask metaphors, and taking a post-structuralist and specifically Foucauldian perspective, the work examines themes of performance, trace, disguise, protection, discipline and transformation. The central argument is that the effects of both compulsory reflection, and writing online, destabilise and ultimately challenge the humanist ideals on which reflective practices are based: those of a ‘true self’ which can be revealed, understood, recorded, improved or liberated through the process of writing about thoughts and experiences. Rather than revealing and developing the ‘true self’, reflecting online and for assessment produces fragmented, performing, cautious, strategic selves. As a result, it offers an opportunity to work critically with an awareness of audience, genres of writing and shifting subjectivity. This is rarely, if ever, explicitly the goal of such practices. Instead, online reflective practices are imported wholesale from their offline counterparts without acknowledgement of the difference that being online makes, and issues of power in high-stakes reflection are disguised or ignored. Discourses of authentic self-knowledge, personal and professional development, and transformative learning are not appropriate to the nature of high-stakes online reflection. The combination creates passivity, anxiety and calculation, it normalises surveillance, and it produces rituals of confession and compliance. More critical approaches to high-stakes online reflection, which take into account addressivity, experimentation and digitality, are proposed.

2012-06-29T00:00:00Z Stonehouse, Victor Paul http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6306 2012-08-22T13:31:40Z 2012-06-29T00:00:00Z

Title: Rough ground of character: a philosophical investigation into character development, examining a wilderness expedition case study through a virtue ethical lens Authors: Stonehouse, Victor Paul Abstract: There is a long-held assumption that Outdoor Adventure Education (OAE) can develop character. However, little research has explored this belief. While many practitioners, and some scholars, remain committed to character development through OAE, the literature also reveals a growing body of discomfort and suspicion surrounding this assumption. This dissent centres on the vague nature of the term “character,” and the moral philosophical complexities surrounding the concept of character itself. Until “character” is more clearly explicated, any resolution to the current confusion is unlikely. This thesis employs Aristotle’s virtue theory, as espoused in his Nicomachean Ethics, to articulate an understanding of character. Although several scholars have used virtue ethics, commonly referred to as character ethics, to support their claims of character development through OAE, these treatments have been preliminary, warranting this more detailed account. When viewed from this virtue ethical perspective, the question, “Can character be developed through OAE?,” becomes problematic. For Aristotle cautions that different subjects of inquiry yield differing levels of accuracy, and with regard to ethical investigations, such as those into character, one must be content to “indicate the truth roughly and in outline” (I 3§4). Further complicating the matter, Aristotle asserts that virtue, a disposition, and the building block of character is gradually and arduously inculcated over long periods of time (I 7§16). While virtue theory implies that radical character transformation is, in any context, unlikely over brief stints of time, this does not mean that OAE programmes are of little moral worth. To the contrary, a detailed examination into a virtue ethical understanding of character suggests that certain elements of OAE programmes may xii have strong moral relevance. This relevance is found in Aristotle’s three conditions that cultivate the development of virtue, conditions readily found within many OAE courses: moral reflection; moral practice; and sharing in the moral lives of others. Drawing on my own interest and experience within OAE, an expedition seemed an ideal setting to explore the presence and content of Aristotle’s three conditions. In hope of discovering this moral narrative, a qualitative case study was conducted on a two-week wilderness expedition in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. The expedition was a first-year transition experience for students attending a Christian liberal college in the United States. Utilising interviews as a primary method, and observations and texts as secondary methods, the research explored the participants’ expedition experience from a virtue ethical perspective. A thematic analysis revealed that participants reported reflecting on their moral lives in both formal (e.g. group reviews, solo, journals) and informal (e.g. while hiking and performing camp chores) settings. Similarly, whether through the mental and physical endurance required in off-trail navigation, or the care expressed through the acts of service and gracious tolerance necessitated by the social demands of expeditionary life, the participants viewed their wilderness travel as a constant opportunity for moral practice. Lastly, the participants identified the community formed on their expedition to be integral to their increased moral self-perception. Although a virtue ethical perspective precludes claiming anything definitive regarding the participants’ character development, at the least, the expedition can be said to have contributed to their moral journey in ways that are directly relevant to their character.

2012-06-29T00:00:00Z